Existing User

At the time, it seemed like a clear enough concept. This is
1993, on the opening night of a brand new Stockholm gallery. In the
middle of an exhibition consisting of bleak writings and drawings
on the wall - 'like telephone doodles', in the words of the press
release - the artist Bjarne Melgaard, outfitted in a brand-new
Thierry Mugler jacket, picks up the gallery phone and places a call
to his boyfriend in Oslo.1 The call - which may or may
not be experienced as a performance - soon evolves into a
full-blown quarrel. The boyfriend does not appreciate Melgaard's
antics. He does not like being drawn into an art situation in this
way. He finds Melgaard's work, his aesthetic strategies,
meaningless and exploitative - and tells him so, loud and clear.
Melgaard, not one to mince his words, gives as good as he gets, all
the while discreetly popping his habitual pills. But in the heat of
the moment they spill out of his pocket and all over the floor,
pathetic figures of a situation out of control.

If it was a performance - and the press release had certainly
announced it as such - it was a performance gone wrong. Actually,
Melgaard had imagined the whole thing in less specific and more
cautious terms: not even really a performance, but more of a coolly
ephemeral pose: a well-dressed lover's phone exchange set off by an
ephemeral wall drawing. Something more in the spirit of the
polished melancholy of a George Michael song, where gusts of
passion and cruelty are kept in check by of one of the

Bjarne Melgaard, 'Black Low: The Punk Movement Was Just Hippies
with Short Hair', MARTa Herford, 2002. The exhibition was closed by
the legal authorities for its depiction of violence, but was
reopened later on. A recent shooting accident in the local
community seems to have influenced public opinion concerning the
relation between violence and artistic expression.↑

Bjarne Melgaard, 'Interface to God', Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 2002.
As in 'Black Low', Melgaard was processing material related to gay
snuff film milieus and to the cults of violence in Black Metal.↑

Related Features

Journal

Kenneth Anger invited me on a date soon after our first meeting.
And not just any date. I was to pick him up and accompany him as
his guest and chaperone to the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards for
his lifetime achievement award in experimental film..

Online

Journal

In 1979, Rosalind Krauss recognised a crisis in the institution
of critique. Aimed at the anachronistic medium-based distinctions
still prevalent at the time, her text 'Sculpture in the Expanded
Field' provided a cogent warning to would-be historicists....

Journal

You'll need a notebook, green tea and a tape deck... Discover
the work of visionary artist, painter and musician Jutta Koether
through a process of self-actualisation and 'messy insouciance', as
prescribed by Bob Nickas.

Journal

I could never have imagined how I first came across Jutta
Koether. In 2002 Maschenmode showed the work of Helena Huneke. One
work consisted of a series of overlapping pieces of fabrics that,
when drawn back, revealed the photograph of a woman...

Journal

Maeve Connolly identifies artists’ cinemas as a new form of
contemporary public art, demonstrating how artists make explicit
the importance of desire, fantasy and projection in the ongoing
production of the public sphere.

Journal

A pack of younger artists have been responding tentatively to
modernist icons recently, throwing themselves at their feet while
chopping off their legs. In contrast, Jim Shaw's bold and
unfiltered take on the history of art...

Journal

One of the most fruitful meta-curatorial practices of the
contemporary era has been the exploration of the
artist/curator/collector overlap - the act of sifting through a
museum's holdings to compile an exhibition...

Journal

If I were to tell you now that I have come here to speak to you in the name of the Chicken Man, would you believe me? I doubt it. Having read the top of the page, I trust you to have guessed my name. It's not Chicken. But hey, pleased to meet you..

Journal

In the November 2000 issue of Artforum, Richard Hawkins
concluded his 'Top Ten' list - which included everything from
Robert Altman's Three Women to 'Good stuff on TV this
summer' - with a rave for 'Any painting made without using masking
tape'...

Journal

Who in the end really wants to be summed up, boiled down and
categorised? And if that's true of our asinine, but still precious
selves, then why would we want to do just that with an artwork in a
text?